Books, eBooks and the Design of Reading

We talked in class about an online book rental service. I kept thinking about our conversation, and the whole idea of The Book. What exactly is a book? How much of our definition and expectation of “bookness” is bound up (pun intended) with physical qualities: What a hard cover book feels like; what a paperback book feels like and how it fits into a backpack or jacket pocket, and how we can throw a paperback book across the room to a friend – or leave it on the beach while we go get a drink and never worry about it getting wet or sandy. How books smell; how we write in the margins or underline passages, or write our names on the inside cover, etc.

In terms of “navigational” accessibility, books are a delight. Our hands are well-suited to quickly flipping through books, sorting through whole chapters, then individual pages then letting our eyes scan across a couple of pages to find themes or narrative scenes – and books themselves help us out by letting us easily bend a page corner just a half-inch or so, enough to easily mark a particular place among hundreds of others. Even the basic structure of books, with hundreds of pages held together closely with increasing pressure closer to the book spine, helps us by providing the pressure to hold in a scrap of paper as a bookmark. And let’s not forget the ergonomic qualities of books: Unlike a desktop computer, books offer a complete range of physical access postures. We can read them sitting, standing or lying on your back or on your stomach, leaning on an elbow or curled up sideways in a big easy chair with the book nestled between your knees – even upside down, I suppose. Except for the heaviest ones, we can read them propped up in bed, book resting on your chest, easily pushed to one side when you fall asleep. As a piece or platform of information technology, the good-old-fashioned book is pretty sophisticated.

In recent years there have been a number of thoughtful books about the future that good-old-fashioned technology. “The Gutenberg Elegies” by Sven Birkerts is worth a read, or at the very least a Google: http://www.enotes.com/gutenberg-elegies-salem/gutenberg-elegies. And as long as we’re thinking Gutenberg, check out Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page

Like all really well-designed and simple technologies, books have become a fundamental species of artifact in our culture. Put them on the same list with other fundamental artifacts such as tableware (spoons, plates, forks, cups, etc.), shoes and eyeglasses. Like dogs, they come in a wide assortment of shapes and sizes, colorations and conformations, but somehow we can always tell when that thing over there is a book. (In a sense, you can ONLY judge a book by its cover because only books have covers – and we’re willing to call magazines large flimsy paperbacks.) If the “real world” is a vast, impossibly complex jungle of information, books are a domesticated species of information containers that we have created and crafted over the centuries to serve us in a variety of roles.

All these qualities of books and the experience of reading are part of the total sense of “book design” that professional book designers consider. The graphic design elements are perhaps the most obvious factors that consumers encounter, and most of us are pretty good at the sort of intuitive evaluation that helps us decide to buy or not to buy: Pick up a book, briefly examine its cover, its typeface, its weight, and almost immediately make a decision about whether it is the right kind of book for our purposes.

Think about how much information about a book can be almost immediately apparent by glancing at its cover, front and back, a scan of the inside of the cover and maybe a quick read of a couple inside paragraphs. That is because bibliophiles (book lovers) have learned to “read” the various design clues that book designers use to communicate information about the type of content and experience this book represents. These clues are what we would call “meta-information” or “meta-descriptors” of the book.

As elements of design these can be as obvious as a gaudy or lurid cover illustration of battling space ships to announce the book as an old-fashioned Star Wars type of sci-fi novel. Or, they can be as subtle as choosing an elegant, serif typeface to lend an air of erudite scholarship and intellectual refinement to a book about the history of poetry. We can all recognize the space ships; most book lovers learn to identify the designed “mood” of typefaces, even though they may never consciously think about it but only learn by experience.

The question, then, for designers in the 21^st century: Which of the qualities of the traditional book can be translated into digital platforms? AND, perhaps more important in the digital age: How does the designer craft the total experience of reading -- not just the physical format of the readable object?

Do we expect an “e-book” read on an iPhone or a Blackberry to have many or most of the same qualities of that old-fashioned reading experience? How about the experience available on -- and the experience "through" or "with" -- one of the new generation of e-book platforms such as the Amazon Kindle http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00154JDAI/?tag=googhydr-20&hvadid=3254143881&ref=pd_sl_177pa6cuyf_e

or the Sony Reader? http://ebookstore.sony.com/reader/

or the Barnes&Noble Plastic Logic reader http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=21365

Keep reading -

Steve